"Multi-dimensional
models of human societies are needed in order to come to grips with the
empirical evidence. The difficulty is that social scientists and
sociologists in particular are still captives of a philosophical science
theory which started with Descartes and took its cue from physics at
that early stage of development. (...) Theoretical models of the type we
call universal laws or generalizations were sufficient and sufficiently
reality-congruent to serve the requirements of physicists at that
stage. (...) But for some time now they have been supplemented even in
the physical sciences themselves by theoretical models which, unlike
laws, are multidimensionaland which make it
possible to handle experimentally data about objects such as large
molecules, genes and chromosomes with several levels of integration
acting and reacting upon each other".

“Concepts
such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are telling examples of the
tendency to treat as separate entities set apart from each other problem
fields at a high level of synthesis, symbolically represented by
different substantives (...). They are widely used as if they referred
to aspects of this world which exist apart from each other. Thus one
may, for instance, ask whether language is an aspect of nature or an
aspect of culture. (...) ...the dominant interest at present is directed
towards either/or questions. Questions concerning the relationship or,
in other words, questions of synthesis, may by comparison be regarded as
marginal, as questions with little cognitive value. [But] the natural
and the social, the social and the individual modes of existence of
humans are inseparable; they are closely interwoven.”

Norbert Elias, The Symbol Theory.

“I have tried to indicate the twofold character of our
experienced world, as a world independent of, but including, ourselves
and as a world mediated for our understanding by a web of human-made
symbolic representations predetermined by their natural constitution,
which materializes only with the help of processes of social learning.” (Elias, Symbol t., 129).

“... No one seems to have thoroughly examined whether the symbolic
representation of the world in the form of a multitude of stationary
antitheses is really the form best suited to represent the world as it
is. On closer inspection one may discover soon enough that no antithesis
can adequately represent its subject matter without a complementary
synthesis and, in most cases, without a processual synthesis. (...) Many
of them are representations not of facts, but of speculations about
facts or of mixtures of facts and fantasy”.